


Making Love and War

by cable69



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-10
Updated: 2015-12-10
Packaged: 2018-05-05 23:11:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,587
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5393768
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cable69/pseuds/cable69
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Good times,” he said reminiscently. “I lived in a commune for a while. We were very… free-spirited.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Making Love and War

**Author's Note:**

> originally posted on ff.net; unedited.
> 
> "Written for a kink meme prompt, which is as follows:
> 
> Seeing this picture and seeing this video [ff won’t let post the links cuz it’s a bitch (that’s right, fanfiction dot net, you’re a bitch); they’re Chris Pine in Bottle Rocket (Google. It.) and a clip from the Tony’s with a piece from the musical Hair.] made me decide on one thing---Kirk used to be a hippie! I thought it would be interesting (and fucking hilarious) to see just what Starfleet has to say about this (military and hippies don't exactly have a loving relationship, although Kirk swears that with him it was hate AND love put together.)"

They were gathered in Kirk’s room, toasting his birthday. Scotty had brought his best scotch to the celebration, and everybody but Spock was tossing their glass back cheerfully. Uhura, Chekov, Sulu, and McCoy were there, selflessly helping Kirk with the alcohol.

Talking and laughing, they settled on various chairs and beds while Kirk popped a bottle of champagne. McCoy put in an album of the pictures Chekov had taken at during various missions. There was a great picture of Sulu, clearly drunk, leaning heavily on Nurse Chapel and laughing while she cocked a sedative, glaring at him. They had so much fun looking at those pictures that everybody insisted Kirk show some more, so he loaded a few old photo albums and set the slideshow.

At first, they were just pictures of Kirk as a fluffy-haired kid, with his family back in Iowa. Jim grinning on a horse, age five. Jim and his brother Sam on bikes, age seven. Winona holding ice cream away from (age four) Jim’s straining hands. And then, without much transition, the pictures went from kid Jim to older teenager Kirk—Kirk aged eighteen, leaning up against a fence.

Everybody made shocked noises. Kirk aged eighteen had shoulder-length blonde hair and wore a blue bandana headband, a nose ring, a tye-dye t-shirt, and long, torn up blue jeans.

Kirk aged thirty-eight grinned at the picture of his polar opposite self. “I was a bit of a character,” he admitted. The pictures continued. Kirk aged twenty-two perched on a tree branch, shaking his fist at a policeman on the ground. Kirk aged nineteen putting a finger to his lips as he climbed through a window. Kirk aged twenty-two leading a mile-long column of protestors down Market Street. Kirk aged twenty, a cigarette to his lips.

“Is that a joint?” said Uhura, shocked. Kirk nodded solemnly.

“Good times,” he said reminiscently. “I lived in a commune for a while. We were very… free-spirited.”

“No wonder you’ve got an STI marker on your medical record,” said McCoy. Kirk stuck his tongue out at him.

“Excuse me, Captain, but why do you possess so many pictures of yourself engaging in illegal activities?” said Spock.

Kirk glanced at the picture on the screen. He had his arms wrapped around two men, who had their arms wrapped around two women. They were standing in front of a long-bearded priest who was holding a Bible and flicking off the camera. 

“We were protesting anti-polyamory laws,” he explained to the puzzled crew. “Remember the marry-ins they had years ago, where a ton of people would go convince a clerk or a pastor to marry them and then sue the government when they wouldn’t recognize it? I did that a couple of times. My lawyer’s still working out the legal strings.”

“You did not answer my question, sir.”

Kirk laughed. “Well, why not take pictures? We wanted to save our actions for posterity. And I wanted to look back at a time like this and remember why I thought what I did. You’d’ve done the same, Spock.”

“What, drop a little too much LDS during the free speech movement?” said Spock in a rare moment of sarcasm.

“I would pay to watch you go down on a Mormon,” said Kirk. “And I’ll have you know that LSD is a substance not to be taken lightly. It should be taken very heavily.”

“Drugs? Marry-ins? Protests?” said McCoy. “Jim, I roomed with you for three years with you at the academy and I didn’t see a hint of this.”

“Sure you did,” said Kirk. “Remember when you came in and all of those bearded guys had turned our room into a Chamber of Peace?”

“You told me that was for a humanities project.”

“I lied; I thought you’d guess. What about the time you accidentally broke my bong?”

“Your what?”

“… the glass sculpture, Bones. You really thought it was a vase?”

“Well, sure, it had holes, even though they were in weird places.”

“The peace signs never tipped you off? My earthy smell after weekends camping? The ponytail? The time I overdosed and you had to call in your medical class to help revive me?”

“I just… thought you were eccentric. And what cadet doesn’t experiment with drugs?”

“I didn’t,” chorused everybody but Kirk and McCoy. 

“We wanted Starfleet to make us officers, not redshirts,” said Uhura. “No offense, Scotty.”

“You’re a redshirt, too,” Scotty pointed out.

“Yes, but I’ve got my commanders’ stripes,” said Uhura. “The point being, Starfleet only accepts a minimal of arrest warrants and overdoses and—general mayhem in your police record before they laugh you out of the captain’s track. How on earth did you ever get to be a captain?”

“I really am exceptionally intelligent,” said Kirk, batting his eyelashes. Behind him, a picture of Kirk aged twenty-one preparing to dump a bucket of brackish water onto an oblivious group of gowned, stiff-necked professors at a UC Berkley graduation ceremony flashed onto the screen.

“Despite ewidence to the contrary,” said Chekov. “Really, sir, how did you make captain?”

Kirk sighed. “Starfleet and I don’t see side to side on quite a few issues,” he said. “But I’ll tell you this. Eight five prime nine four.”

“What?” said Sulu. “What does that mean?”

“You’ll figure it out,” said Kirk. “You’re a smart bunch.” He stood. “Now, it’s time for the birthday boy to get some sleep. My shift starts early tomorrow.” Ignoring their protests, he chivvied them out. For a while, he watched pictures flicker across the display. Then he tipped back the rest of his champagne and went to bed, a smile on his face.

x

A week and a half later, at midnight, Chekov sat bolt upright in bed and said, “The recruitment logs!”

He hailed everybody who had been at Kirk’s birthday celebration, other than Kirk, and took them down to a conference room. He accessed the ship’s computer and brought up the Starfleet recruitment logs. The records of ensigns and NCOs were accessible without a password. The higher up you got, the more access you needed. Only admirals could view a captain’s recruitment log (how Kirk had gotten that password, Chekov didn’t want to know). When the computer requested authentication, Chekov gave it the five-word phrase.

The record unlocked and Kirk’s recruitment profile sat before them.

Everybody leaned in over Chekov to get a closer look. They had never seen so much red ink on a piece of digital paper. The first thing they looked at was Kirk’s original application for a captain-track officer’s commission. 

He had written down his qualifications briefly, letting them speak for themselves. McCoy whistled, impressed. Kirk had more extracirriculars than anybody had suspected. He had served on student government, founded a number of clubs, done about twenty hours of community service a week, been a volunteer lifeguard at the free pool in downtown San Francisco, and about twenty other things. The link to his grades made everybody’s jaws actually drop. He was first in his class by a long shot.

“My God,” said McCoy wonderingly. “He barely studied. I never knew.”

Despite his incredible qualifications, including a record thirty-four recommendation letters from Academy teachers and nineteen from outside sources, only one of the six-man panel had greenlit his application. One approval was all a cadet needed to continue in the application process, but it looked bad to the final arbiters if he or she received so few approvals. All of them cited his sixty-two page police record as a reason not to advance him to captain-track.

Two in three advanced to the second stage, which was simple. Like all candidates, Kirk sat a brief interview with an oversecretary, who assessed his physical and mental condition and made sure they were not accepting someone who only looked good on paper. The second stage eliminated another fourth. It was the final stage, where the candidate came before the five chief recruitment officers to convince them of his or her qualifications, that was the most difficult. Only one in fifty—of the reduced number of applicants—were accepted to captain’s track. Most were shunted into first officer or department head track.

Everybody leaned in closer when they saw the second to last link on the page.

“They have video of the interview?” gasped Sulu. “We have to watch it. We have to.”

Chekov glanced around at everybody. “All in faywer?”

“Aye,” said the crew.

Chekov hit play.

Kirk was twenty-eight when he went before the five chief recruitment officers. He had cut his hair—McCoy remembered Kirk coming home, holding his cut-off ponytail in his hand and pledging to bury it and put a tombstone over the gravesite—and looked dashing in cadet red. His nose ring was gone, he was clean-shaven, and he had less dirt underneath his fingernails than usual. He even looked like he wasn’t hungover or high, a rare state.

But Kirk, being Kirk, was going to do things his way (even if he was meeting appearance standards for the first time in his three years at the Academy). He greeted the panel with a single word: “Dudes.”

Back on the Enterprise, everybody groaned. “He would,” somebody muttered.

As one, the panel raised their eyebrows and shuffled their papers. McCoy couldn’t help glancing over at Spock, who also had his eyebrow raised. On the viewscreen, Kirk sat down in on the stool in the middle of the room without being asked to.

They went through the preliminaries quickly; name, rank, serial number, basic qualifications. The eyebrows went up a few more inches when they saw his grades and recommendation letters. When they moved to his police report, the eyebrows disappeared into hairlines entirely. Sulu thought he could smell their skepticism through time.

“Cadet Kirk, you are extremely qualified for the captain’s track,” said the chief officer. “Your grades, recommendations, test results, family history, and activities are outstanding and would alone place you on the admiral’s track. However.” He held up the police record, which unfurled impressively and pooled on the floor. “If you could explain?”

“I rather think it speaks for itself,” said Kirk, grinning at them. Uhura wanted to cover her eyes. Even Spock looked slightly on edge.

“It does have a certain… flavor,” the chief officer admitted. “But the taste is, at the moment, disgusting. You are the grandson of Lawrence Townsend and Virginia O’Leary, are you not?”

“I am, sir,” said Kirk. Chekov mouthed to everybody, Of the Battle of the Cayne System? They nodded yes, surprised. They hadn’t known about Kirk’s famous ancestors.

“And the son of George Kirk, of the USS Kelvin.”

“I am, sir.”

“Then please explain how their descendant was such—for lack of a better term—a hooligan in his formative years.”

“Their descendant was his own man during his formative years,” said Kirk coolly. “While I am delighted that you’ve mentioned my famous grandparents and father, please don’t assume that any of their talent passed on to me. That would be too much of a gamble. Townsend and O’Leary were famous for their measured, calm decision making during one of the most chaotic battles of the Gorn War. My father was famous for saving eight hundred lives, mine included, by sacrificing his own. I doubt that I would be as measured and calm as my grandparents in the midst of battle, and I am not sure if I would have the bravery to do as my father did. But I’ll tell you what I can guarantee you as captain. Those arrest records, those write-ups of my activities, mentions of my work in the organization of the polyamory, life-style, and clean streets movements, are marks of my ability to lead an unformed mass of minds towards one common goal. As a captain of a spaceship, I would get the job you required me to do—done. I might not do it in the expected way. I might not even go by regulations. (As you can see, I’m bad at following the letter of the law.) See, I trust in the sanctity of the mission. The purity of action, if you will. I will do whatever I can within my power to support and defend the Federation of Planets. I believe that I was meant to be in space. I was born there and I’ll die there. I believe wholeheartedly in the Federation and in Starfleet; if you’ve looked closely at my police record, you’ll see that belief, between the narrow lines. I believe that our government does incredible work for an awesome cause, and I hold that cause above even its own standards. What I said earlier, about what I can guarantee you as a captain, is this: Creativity and success, in one messy package called James Tiberius Kirk. Send me to the moon and I’ll send you to the stars.”

That was the end of it. They accepted him with a minimal of fuss. The final document linked was Kirk’s certificate of promise, given to all captain’s track retruits. If Kirk worked hard to fulfill his obligations to Starfleet, they would work just as hard to promote him up the ranks and get him to a captaincy in twenty years. Kirk, of course, achieved his in ten.

“Good speech,” said McCoy. “He was really tryin’ to follow in the footsteps of King, and Blayce, and Dgranon, wasn’t he?”

“He was,” said Scotty. “Ah didnae know he had so much community organizer in him.”

They continued, traces of amazement still evident in their voices. Nobody noticed Spock slip quietly out of the room.

He walked to Kirk’s quarters and knocked lightly. Kirk came to the door, reading glasses perched on his nose and a book tucked under his arm. 

“Come in,” he said, ushering Spock into a chair. “Can I help you?”

“Ensign Chekov accessed your recruitment logs,” said Spock without preamble. “We watched the visual recording of your interview with the chief recruitment officers. I have a query, if I may.”

“You may,” said Kirk, entirely unsurprised by what Spock had said.

“They never asked why, sir, but you told them,” said Spock. “Yet you did not tell them everything. Why do you believe in Starfleet, and in the Federation? The organization is flawed, as you yourself pointed out. Why pay a blood price for a broken system?”

“Why are you in Starfleet, Spock?”

“Because I did not wish to attend the Vulcan Science Academy,” he said.

“That’s not an answer and you know it.”

“I suppose… because I knew it was the right course of action to pursue.”

“And you knew that how?”

Spock paused. “In all honesty, captain, I do not know.”

“Exactly,” said Kirk. “Faith. Belief. I hate what Starfleet does, so I joined them and got myself promoted to try and improve them from the inside. I believe in ideals. In the power of the mind and the heart over the physical body.” He paused to scratch his head. “Not to mention, have you seen the Starfleet women? I’d move to Betelgeuse for ass like that.”

Spock stared at him.

“Plus, the further out you get in the galaxy, the better the illegal substances.” Kirk whipped open a drawer and produced a drawstring bag, which he waggled in front of Spock. “Want to light up with me?”

Spock fled, and Kirk sat back contentedly in his chair. He switched on some Greatful Dead, lit up, and started his paperwork, reflecting that certain things never change.

x


End file.
